At Amazon Web Services’ big annual user conference in Las Vegas this week, executives from the market-leading public cloud made all the moves that spectators were expecting: a few new products, a new generation of server chips for running applications, some customer wins, and greater support for Docker. But one announcement has elicited a rare mix of excitement, curiosity, and even outright confusion from analysts.

With the release of its EC2 Container Service today, Amazon Web Services caught up with public-cloud competitors like Google and Microsoft in deeply supporting the deployment and control of applications packaged up in containers, a trendy alternative to longstanding virtual-machine technology.

Amazon Web Services isn’t only announcing new services at its re:Invent conference in Las Vegas this week. Of course, it’s adding new low-level instances — slices of physical servers — to its market-leading public cloud.

Amazon Web Services today began its string of news announcements at its re:Invent conference in Las Vegas by coming out with a new enterprise-grade database engine, which shows a new front for the cloud provider.

An increasing number of businesses rely almost exclusively on the Amazon cloud instead of their own data center infrastructure. And if GitHub intends to grow larger, it needs to go where the business is.

Evident.io, a startup with cloud-based software for monitoring usage of the popular Amazon Web Services public cloud in order to detect security risks, said today that it’s raised $9.85 million in a new funding round.

Chip giant Intel has found a way to demonstrate the value of big data analytics in the big health care industry. It’s partnering with Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research and working on a study that will pull patterns from data coming from patients’ wearable devices.